Bargain Rainbow
5:55 p.m. - 2008-05-12


I find that Mother's Day is a lot of work for me. I usually arrange everything for the honoring of the mother-in-law, but that's OK because she is a nice lady. I hope she has no idea that all the thought and effort came from me. One thing I like to do is to send the spouse over to see his mother by himself so that she can have her baby boy all to herself on her special day. This year I made a mini gift basket with a big loaf of home-baked bread, a jar of homemade jam (plum), and a dozen blueberry pecan muffins.

Not much knitting went on this week, but I did fix up one of the T-shirts I bought which technically counts as sewing something. These very nice T-shirts were on a sale table for only $5, and they fit great except that the hips were way too big and floppy (some kind of design flaw). This is a quick fix, so, since the fabric was great and the colors terrific, I bought three of them. Two of them are in Hawaiian prints and one is plain. I will be wearing them a lot once I get them fixed.

The work on the peasant blouses continues. I have the pattern all graded and only needed to design the embroidery pattern. Today I drew two patterns all out and am ready to begin. Melissa had said that she wanted me to sew the yellow fabric first, but I could not find it anywhere. I found all the rest of the colors we got at Joann's, but no yellow. I looked for it for a week, but when Melissa came over for Sunday dinner, we were looking at the fabric, and she told me that she is calling the orange fabric she chose 'yellow' to differentiate it from the more pumpkiny orange I got for myself. So we never bought any yellow at all and I wasted a week looking for something I never had.

I decided that I did not have enough solid colored cotton scraps for any applique I might want to do on the Mexican blouses, so, since it was Mother's Day and I always get myself a gift on that day, I went down to Joann's and got 14 quarter yard lengths of cotton in the most beautiful rainbow of colors. This was a cheap treat because the whole thing only cost a little over $10. I haven't bought any 1/4 yard pieces in a log time and they looked larger than I expected.

I have been thinking about the Mexican blouses and how I can use a lot of different techniques on them. I can crochet edgings, knit lace, embroider, do a whitework version, all kinds of things. I am trying to get one done for Melissa before she goes on her vacation to Texas to visit her old friends.

I hear my water boiling, time to go finish cooking dinner.